git

This blogpost is about how to install the semaphore user-interface for running ansible. Ansible is an automation language for automating IT infrastructures. It consists of command-line executables (ansible, ansible-playbook for example) that can run a single task using a module (using the ansible executable), or can run multiple tasks using multiple modules in order to perform more complex setup requirements (using the ansible-playbook executable). The downside of running IT tasks via the command-line is that there is no logging by default, unless someone decides to save the standard out to a file, which, if multiple people start doing that by hand will probably lead to a huge collection of text files which are hard to navigate. Also, when tasks are run via a common place, it’s an all or nothing situation: everybody has access to all the scripts, or to nothing.

This is a quick post on using git on a server. I use my Synology NAS as a fileserver, but also as a git repository server. The default git package for Synology enables git usage on the command line, which means via ssh, or via web-DAV. Both require a logon to do anything with the repository. That is not very handy if you want to clone and pull from the repository in an automated way. Of course there are ways around that (basically setting up password-less authentication, probably via certificates), but I wanted simple, read-only access without authentication. If you installed git on a linux or unix server you get the binaries, but no daemon, which means you can only use ssh if you want to use that server for central git repositories.